In early June, wildlife rehabber Jane Newhouse was placing a group of orphaned ducklings in a warm brooder when one of them caught her eye.
“He was struggling to walk,” Newhouse told The Dodo. “His little toes were curled in, and he was kind of walking on his knuckles. It looked really uncomfortable.”
That’s when Newhouse’s daughter spoke up: “Mom, is something wrong with that one?”
The duckling had just lost his mom in a tragically common accident: She was trying to lead her babies across the road when a driver intentionally hit her — right in front of another driver, who couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He pulled over, gently gathered the ducklings and rushed them to Newhouse Wildlife Rescue in Massachusetts.
It turned out that one duckling’s feet hadn’t formed properly (likely due to a vitamin deficiency in the egg), and without intervention, they would have stayed curled. So Newhouse got creative. Using the lid of a food storage container and some medical tape, she fashioned him a pair of the tiniest orthopedic shoes.
At first, the duckling wasn’t sure about his new footwear. But soon, he was waddling faster — and clearly happier.
The team started calling him Happy Feet, and the name stuck.
“We changed the shoes every day to keep them clean and dry,” Newhouse explained. “After three days, we took him to the vet and took them off, and his feet were perfectly flat. He was walking normally.”
Happy Feet wasn’t the only duckling to arrive at Newhouse Wildlife Rescue this spring. Just days earlier, another good Samaritan witnessed another mother duck get hit by a car. Traffic stopped as her confused ducklings scrambled across the Massachusetts Turnpike.
